If asked to describe himself in three words (a question we would never ask anyone) Amir Fallah might say: artist, art-director, art-lover, but as the creator of Beautiful/Decay magazine he’d realize that those categories aren’t all that descriptive. A person is more than the sum of descriptive words, and definitions are in the eye of the beholder. Two “art-lovers” might never agree to like the same picture; no art director is created equal and some artists have never touched a paintbrush in their lives.

Beautiful/Decay, with Fallah behind it, has helped to define a way of seeing culture that takes all its points into account. Within the magazine’s pages, (illustration, design, and popular music traditionally viewed as low-brow culture) share exhibition space with the high-brow. Beautiful/Decay’s broad circulation is point in fact, that this sensibility doesn’t belong to Amir alone, but is rapidly becoming the way we all see things. Yeah, it is possible to eat Cheetos and fillet mignon in the same day or listen to 50-cent while getting ready to peruse a gallery full of Gerhard Richter’s; we’re all complicated people with varied interests. It’s about time someone decided to acknowledge that.

HOW A ZINE BECOMES A MAG

The Vulture: Beautiful/Decay’s been around for how long now?

Amir Fallah: There’s been two different incarnations of the magazine but the first one started in 1996. It was a black and white zine that my best friend and me started out of sheer boredom. We lived in Fairfax, Virginia, which is twenty minutes outside of D.C. and there was absolutely nothing going on in our neighborhood. we were bored to tears. Anything exciting that we wanted to do we had to go to D.C. to do. . . and they had all these punk and hardcore shows

V: Specifically, was Dischord really active?

AF: No. It wasn’t Dischord bands, that was more the older crowd. It was more hardcore bands: Battery, Damnation, Avail, Lifetime, Integrity. . . just all these different hardcore bands. At that time I was really into hardcore, and I was really into skateboarding and graffiti, and all those different subcultures meet up at hardcore shows for whatever reason. We used to actually go up and down the east coast to go to shows in Jersey and Philly, that was just the subculture we were involved in.

Everyone was making zines back then and selling them at shows for a couple of dollars. So my neighbor Jay and I thought “hey, why not start our own zine” and, you know, have the voice of the suburbs heard.

V: Yeah! So was it primarily a music zine back then?

AF: No. There was very little music at all in it.

V: That seems different for a fanzine back in the day. . .

AF: Yeah. We had some music but we were trying to take the idea of a fanzine, only apply it to all our various interests. I was really into hardcore but I was also really into independent hiphop. So our first issue was mainly about graffiti, but it also featured a lot of fine art, we did an art interview with a friend of mine who created these illegal installations outside of the Hirschorn, we did an interview with Kara Swan. . . we were all over the place.

The magazine hasn’t really changed that much in that respect, it’s still a mix of fine art, street art, music, illustration. . . the only thing that’s been added to the mix was design, because back then I didn’t even know what graphic design was. The whole zine was created at Kinkos with a a photocopier and pagemaker. . .

V: Pagemaker? That’s pretty good. Actually, I thought you’d say cut and paste.

AF: We were a little more advanced. We had a good art department at our High School. But this was a small thing, we, Jay and I, did 2 black and white issues, and then I made one more black and white issue by myself. The first three issues collectively were only 300 copies.

V: And Beautiful/Decay now has a circulation of 3,000?

AF: No now we are at 45,000 copies. When I restarted the magazine as a full color magazine I printed 3,000 copies to start. I didn’t think much about the zine once I was in college. I didn’t even own a copy of the black and white zines. It was just something small that I did in high school to kill time. but I went to college and they had this program called The New York Studio Program.

V: Ha! My art school did the same thing. . .

AF: Yeah. So I was there, doing that and some internships, one of which was at Deitch Projects. When I was working at Deitch it really opened my eyes to the real workings of the art world, it has always been one of my favorite galleries, but when I was working there I was really timid and shy and didn’t talk to a single person in the office. Years later when I got back in touch with them and worked with them on a couple of projects no one even remembered me working there. I was there for six months and nobody in the office remembers me, which is odd considering they probably didn’t have many brown, persian guys working for them.

While in NYC I had to commute everyday on the subway and I would always buy magazines to read during the commute. I could never find anything that I was really into. ArtForum was too stuffy and aimed at a much older demographic, while Juxtapoz and skate mags were just too low brow. . . I couldn’t find something for someone like me who had many varied interests. When I went back to Baltimore I decided to start Beautiful/Decay back up again. I had a show and sold some paintings and put that money towards the first full-color issue of Beautiful/Decay

So there was a six year gap between the zine and the magazine.

Yeah, it was quite some time before I even thought about the magazine.

ISSUE A

V: So how exactly did you start? Did you make the entire first issue by yourself?

AF: No I funded it myself and over-saw the whole thing but I had two graphic design students from MICA, the school I went to, help me out. Between issue A and issue B there was a nine to ten month gap. I had to cold call a bunch of stores to convince them to carry Beautiful/Decay, the magazine didn’t even have a barcode. I had no idea what I was doing.

V: So how does one go about trying to distribute a magazine?

AF: It was the same way that I did it with the zines. I would walk into a store and ask if I could sell then on consignment and I would mail out sample copies. I got into the internet and looked at magazines that were slightly bigger than Beautiful/Decay and who they sold to. I just did hours and hours of research.

By the time the first issue was done I had the magazine in about 40-50 independent stores all over the world. Once that happened I got the attention of a couple of small distributors. That’s really how it happened. I didn’t have a trust fund, I wasn’t rich, I didn’t even have a separate bank account for the magazine. I worked part-time jobs, did some teaching, painted murals, sold some artwork from High School on Ebay. Whatever I could do to raise money to fund the magazine. . .

WHEN YOUR NIGHT JOB SUPPORTS YOUR DAY JOB

V: Wait! Did your artwork from high school sell really well on Ebay?

AF: Yeah. The trick to selling art work on Ebay is that if it’s bad it sells well. I literally made thousands of dollars on Ebay. This was awhile ago, before Ebay was huge. I was on of the first , I dunno, hundred of people to sell art work on Ebay. . . after awhile I had to pull away because I was getting sucked in. There was this whole community of people who made a living off of selling art work on Ebay.

V: You must have had a lot of your art from high school.

AF: Yeah. Well, I was an only child so my mom kept it all. . .

V: So issue B?

AF: Yeah. So nine months later I had enough money and I started to throw release parties, all over the place up and down the east coast.

V: At what kind of places?

AF: I did a couple at bars, bike-courier’s warehouses, I did one in a vegetarian cafeteria. . . wherever I had friends that knew or had a place to host a party and we would charge money at the door. It was really a communal effort. With the second issue we had a couple of ads and I figured out how to get a barcode.

Towards the end of the second issue I met my current business partners; Ben Osher and Fubz. They were really instrumental in taking something I did as a hobby and turning it into a real publication. They’re both my age, we’re all in our late twenties, so they didn’t have a lot of real-world experience, they’re both business-minded and extremely hard workers. Its amazing what a little honest work will do.

Our growth is organic. We don’t have backers, we’ve never taken out a loan, we worked for free for a number of years until we could justify taking a salary. For us, it’s never been about money, we’ve always thought we were doing something that contributed to the betterment of art, culture, and design.

A LAID-BACK SENSE OF URGENCY

V: Since, you’re an artist yourself, do you feel like you have to put your own art on the back-burner to keep up with the magazine?

“Sheltered (DM, TC, JS)” an installation by Mr. Fallah

AF: I think for some people it might be something that is hard to do. It is a challenge, but because I’ve always had my hand in so many different things. I can’t sit still so I’ve gotten really good at multi-tasking. I’ve just had to create a really rigid schedule for myself so that I can focus on my art career and also on Beautiful/Decay.

V: What’s the schedule?

AF: I wake up a 7 a.m. everyday. I paint for two and a half hours. At 9:30 I take a shower and I’m at the office by 10. I’m there till 6 then I go home and eat dinner, hang out with my girlfriend, then go to bed. I do that every single day, by sticking to that schedule I get a lot more done then I did in art school and I had half the responsibilities I do now.

I couldn’t stop making art and just do the magazine. I think of myself as an artist first and a creative director second. I show my work continuously throughout the year, and going to my own exhibitions and working with galleries has naturally lead to a lot of good contacts for the magazine. It works for me because I don’t go to a lot of parties and, you know, exchange business cards. I rather network and meet like minded people in a more natural setting.

V: How does your artwork fit into the art world? Do you feel like part of a group or part of a scene? What?

AF: I’m very careful not to fall into any kind of group or scene. For instance, because of the long history the magazine has had in the illustration/graphic design, all those “low-brow” graffiti-interest types of work, I get contacted by a lot of galleries that might not like my work but they might like me or think I make sense because of the magazine. I’ll do those type of shows if the other artists make sense to me, or if the gallery is a serious gallery, but I don’t want to get pigeoned-holed as a low-brow artist, or even the other end, as someone who thinks they’re too cool to exhibit in an alternative space.

Even though I try not to be lumped into one category I hear a lot that I fit in with the art of the west coast. When I lived on the east coast people always told me that I needed to go to California. So I came out here and have had a lot of success. I guess they were right.

V: Funny. It seems like your work ethic is stereotypically east coast.

AF: Yeah, the stereotypical “gotta get a hundred things done before mid-day”, but I like to think that my approach to getting all those things done is laid-back. I like to call it a laid-back sense of urgency.

WHERE WOULD WE BE WITHOUT MINOR THREAT?

V: I noticed that issue T is about “psychedelic art”, which seems really timely considering the exhibition at the Whitney on the art of the 60s right now, and that psychedelic art, and the idea of the hippie is everywhere right now. . . how do you come up with your themes?

AF: Well when we came up with the idea for issue T, we had no idea that the Whitney or 3rd Ward would be doing a show on psychedelic art right now. . .

V: I figured that, and that’s what I mean, how’d you tap into that?

AF: That happens a lot. I never base the themes on “what’s hot” or “what’s going to be hot” it just ends up that way. The themes are still timely, even if I don’t really mean them to be.

The way ninety percent of the content in the magazine happens is just me being interested in something. I go to several art fairs a year and I’ll pull from the things I see. It’s like curating a show. Right now we’re working on an issue called “The Institutionalized Issue” and it’s all interviews with curators and art director who are doing interesting things or living in interesting places. . . but fitting music or graffiti into an issue like that is pretty tough so I have to think outside the box of my own theme and think “what is a musical institution?”

For instance, I have wanted to interview Ian McKay since the black and white zine, and to me he’s a musical institution, though of course, he denies it. He was such a constant influence for me growing up. He gets a lot of flack for being who he is. The kids that love to party and get fucked up knock him for writing the song “straight edge” and the Straight Edge kids talk shit about him because he isn’t part of the current hardcore scene. But to me, Beautiful/Decay might not even be around if it wasn’t for him. I learned a lot about ethics, self discipline and hard work from listening to his music over the years. I don’t know where I’d be if I never heard a Minor Threat tape.